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The alleged victim, the witness who testified under oath about her alleged
stupefied
rape by a pair of physicians
, comes back to court as a spectator.

She takes a seat in the front row for the closing arguments of the high-flying defense squad.

She lasts less than an hour.

Long enough to hear — and perhaps to flee from — yet another denunciation of her character.

It is inexhaustible, the judicially permissible besmirching and smearing — what would otherwise be known as slander and thus actionable, outside of a courtroom — to which a sexual assault complainant can be subjected.

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This is the legal cat’s cradle of a rape trial (though Canada’s Criminal Code no longer uses that word), where the self-professed casualty, the purported injured party, is also the central witness.

While there is always and quite rightly an assumption of innocence for the accused, there is inevitably a presumption of dubiousness about the accuser. So her sex life is scrutinized, the amount that she had to drink is measured, and her motivation hypothesized.

The “other truth” as one of the defense counsel had described it earlier, when the purported victim was in the stand.

In that postulated version of the truth, there was no sexual assault, no drugging of the non-victim prior to the alleged sexual assault in a downtown hotel room, no simultaneous rape by two doctors upon a recent med school graduate — friend and mentored colleague of one of the accused — and no basis for complaint other than morning-after remorse over boozy threesome sex with professional colleagues and a reputation at stake.

So, following that logic, the complainant would have triggered this entire trial — now into its 11th week, which has put the alleged victim through the wringer of defense bullying, the most intimate details of her life exposed in open court — because she was trying to undo the reputation damage and contain the potential scandal.

Because women cry rape when the sex is in fact completely consensual, if sloppily sodden in alcohol and distinguished by non-consummation . . . erectile dysfunction . . . pass-out party pooping . . . the whole kit and caboodle of a night of anticipated hedonism gone all limp as a noodle.

An honest and mistaken belief of consent is the main framework of defense in the case of Drs. Amitabh Chauhan and Suganthan Kayilasanathan, lifelong friends, both 36, both clearly the apple of their families’ eye and both with a staggering sense of doctor entitlement, that God-like quality assumed by many medical professionals.

Back on the night of Feb. 12 and into the morning of Feb. 13, 2011, one was married and the other was engaged, but that was of no consequence in their plans to rock the kasbah on a night off from work, with Kayilasanathan booking the room at the downtown Sheraton (as on frequent occasions previously when the two-docs went out on the town, knowing they’d be too drunk to drive home) and Chauhan teeing up the invitation to the woman.

The prosecution maintains two-docs drugged the then-23-year-old complainant (no trace of typical rape drugs showed up in blood and urine tests conducted later, too long after the alleged assault to show up in a tox screen) and then raped her because she was not capable at that point of framing consent. On the witness stand, the woman — who cannot be identified under a publication ban —
described sensory flashbacks
of the alleged assaults and her inability, physically and otherwise, to stop the accused.

Chauhan is also facing separate charges of drugging (stupefying as it’s known in the indictment) and sexually assaulting another woman he’d previously dated during an ex-cadets reunion at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont., in 2003. That alleged victim testified early in the case.

The defense against that charge cuts to the chop-chop chase: Never happened, wasn’t there on that particular date — a point of conflicting memory from various other witnesses called.

On Thursday, the defense presented their closing arguments to Justice Julie Thorburn.

“It’s obvious the sex was consensual,” said Marlys Edwardh, who represents Chauhan and has taken the lead questioning role in the case. “(Chauhan’s) evidence was clear that with respect to the sex, she initiated it.”

As for the primary witness’ evidence — a week in the witness stand: “We take the view it is fundamentally flawed when somebody brings scrutiny to it.”

Edwardh scoffed at a theory she derisively called “The Plan,” which was put forth during cross-examination of yet another doctor witness — for the defense, a man, Dr. III, who’d briefly dated the complainant and was a friend of the two defendants — which posited that the sexual assaults were plotted as “
revenge rape
” after the woman dumped Dr. III.

Crown Cara Sweeny rose to clarify: “My position is that he (Dr. III) was aware of the plan to sexually assault (the woman) and he declined to take part.”

Pointing out that the accused had met with the complainant in the hotel’s lobby bar for a drink before the three moved to a Wellington St. lounge, Edwardh said scornfully: “They elected to take her out in public view and onto a (dance) floor where there were cameras.”

Edwardh added: “My goodness, this was a drunken night of revelry.”

Then she took dead aim at the complainant. “By any measure of a witness, she was argumentative, she was combative.”

This doubtless was a reference to a juncture late in her two-day cross-examination when the witness objected to Edwardh’s rendition of events that night, after the trio returned to the hotel room — that it was the complainant who got the sex ball rolling, inducing Chauhan to dance with her and, after he stumbled and fell back on the bed, getting on top of him, putting her hand on his crotch, guiding his hand to her groin, after which Chauhan performed consensual oral sex on the woman.

The witness’ snapping response to that scenario on Thursday became fodder for Edwardh’s characterization of the complainant as a woman with an agenda. “It doesn’t reflect a witness who’s really here to do her best to tell you the truth,” she told Thorburn. “She has an agenda instead.”

The agenda goes thusly: “It’s clear she was acutely aware that her reputation was critical to her advancement in medicine.”

Thus the rape bluff, which Edwardh suggested was actually prompted by the witness’ mother, who called in the cops. “She had lost control over the process,” said the lawyer, of the sudden police involvement. “Her only option to save things was to become an active participant in the judicial system.”

Cop chicanery was raised later by David Humphrey, who represents Kayilasanathan and had to contend with a statement his doctor gave to investigators five days after the alleged assault, in which he denied having any sexual contact with the complainant. When he took the stand, Kayilasanathan admitted
he’d lied in that statement
, that he’d kissed the woman and licked her breasts, but that’s as far as things went because she seemed to prefer Chauhan.

OK, the guy lied, said Humphrey. But that’s because he was terrified — of the browbeating cop, of a ruined career, of a fiancée who might break off their engagement when she heard about this.

“It was predictable, almost to the point of inevitable, that (the questioning) would extract a false denial.”

Still. “The lie ought not to be held against him.”

Humphrey, too, went after the complainant. Because that’s the sport of rape trials. “The manner in which she answered questions is very concerning. In many ways she presented as an advocate for her own cause, someone who conspicuously has an agenda.

“When I was asking questions, she was entirely resistant to every suggestion I made.”

Perhaps because Humphrey, like Edwardh, suggested the woman was a drunk, a hussy and a lyin’ sexual predator.

But by that point in the day, the witness, the alleged rape victim, was long gone from the courtroom, ears and cheeks and probably temper burning.

A woman who claims rape doesn’t get to be angry or bitter or snap-back hostile when lawyers fling dirt in her face.

Grin or grimace, but bear it with docility. Lest you’re accused of having an attitude, an axe to grind, an
agenda
.

Correction - June 27, 2014:
This article was edited from a previous version that mistated the year in which Amitabh Chauhan attended an ex-cadets reunion as 2011.

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